All posts tagged Conference Call Color

Not exactly earth-shattering news. But through the lens of condiment sales, U.S. shoppers are still pretty shell-shocked. H.J. Heinz company executives offered this bit of color on their conference call today, via a Thomson Reuters transcript:

The U.S. consumer is in a funk, while we see glimmers of hope, the reality is they are making conscience and significant tradeoffs in their budget and for the first time ever maybe since the Great Depression we’re seeing 27% of them without discretionary income based on the Nielsen data we looked at last week which is an incredibly high number.

Heinz reported a bottom-line beat this morning, though top-line revenue was a bit light. The bright spot, unsurprisingly, was their emerging markets business. As a result, Heinz said it would begin shifting more of its marketing and promotional spending to markets such as China, Indonesia and Russia, where it has been paying off better.

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